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The very identity of psychoanalysis—who should practice it and how and what kind of a discipline it is—are the fundamental questions raised in Robert Wallerstein's painstaking account of the long standing battles over lay analysis, a contentious issue only resolved within the last decade. Is psychoanalysis a part of psychiatry, primarily a therapy for neurotics and an expanded clientele of borderlines and psychotics? Is it an independent discipline, a science of the mind and thus a part of psychology, as Freud insisted, and not a mere handmaiden of psychiatry. Freud believed that the profession of psychoanalyst should be open to physician and nonphysician alike and condemned his American followers for their militant medical emphasis.
Believing with Freud, that psychoanalysis is indeed a special, perhaps unique, science, one of America's most distinguished psychoanalysts, a former president of both the American and the International Psychoanalytical Associations, Wallerstein has written a careful, scholarly account of the controversy within the psychoanalytic movement. He also has been the most prominent American voice to call for systematic psychoanalytic research, which usually has required the cooperation of other disciplines, notably psychology. Indeed, Wallerstein (1986) directed the Menninger Foundation's psychotherapy process and outcome study summarized in his landmark Forty Two Lives in Treatment.
Even tempered, eager to seek common ground among sometimes cat-fighting opponents, Wallerstein found that his official positions placed him firmly on the hot seat in the dispute between the American and the International Psychoanalytical Associations and organized psychologists, which culminated in the final acceptance of nonmedical candidates for full psychoanalytic training and practice in 1988.